Experiencing Nothingness

In 1970 when I was twenty years old and in college, I read a newly published book entitled “The Experience of Nothingness.” The author, philosopher Michael Novak, was visiting our campus, and I wanted to know what he had to say so I could engage him in conversation. 

I still remember his visit vividly fifty years later. I sat on the floor before him in a room on the top floor of the Student Union and asked him questions. His ideas resonated with me. At that point in my life I considered myself an existentialist, although I was seriously exploring spiritual traditions. In fact later that year I declared myself a Religion major, going “all in” on my spiritual search.  

His book described my experience. It was a powerful awareness of the indescribable depths of existence. The only vocabulary I had to articulate my experience at the time was the language of existentialism. This Depth was neither something nor nothing. Nothingness described it as well as any word. Yet this awareness of No-thing-ness felt very spiritual, hence my attraction to spirituality and religion. 

The existentialist author Camus called this “the absurd.” He saw it as evidence of a universe without meaning. Sartre had a book called “Being and Nothingness.” Popularly the experience was called “existential angst.” These days that phrase is a cliché that means little more than a teenage or midlife crisis, but in the post-WWII, post-Holocaust, era it was powerfully fresh and profound. One was called to live an authentic life in the face of the emptiness at the heart of existence.  

Now I look back on that time in my life and realize that I was in touch with the Holy and did not realize it. I was aware of the essence of the universe and human nature. This was God without all the fluff and religious tradition. This experience of bare essence that was powerfully present and real to me as a twenty-year old is what I would now call Reality, the Divine, the Holy, Godhead or God Beyond God. It is Godness, for want of a better term. God beyond images. It is Nothingness in the sense that God is not a thing among things or a being among beings.

I tend to call it the Ground of Being or Being Itself as Tillich does, but I could equally call it Non-Being. It is the Source the duality of Being and Non-Being come from. I call this reality God, but this is not the traditional theistic Deity of Western religion. It is older than God.